Museum defends Goya exhibit criticized by blogger

First it was Rodin. Now it’s Goya.

Gary Arseneau, a Florida-based artist who blogs about art authenticity issues, alleges that the Honolulu Museum of Art is misrepresenting the origins of a series of etchings by the late 18th-century Spanish artist Francisco de Goya y Lucientes in an upcoming exhibit.

“Francisco Goya: The Disasters of War” opens Tuesday at the Honolulu Museum Art, offering a glimpse of the carnage and human suffering associated with warfare during Spain’s Peninsular Wars. It is not the first time the museum has displayed Goya’s works, which are part of its permanent collection.

Just as he had a problem with sculptures at a Honolulu Museum of Art exhibit two years ago bearing Rodin’s signature despite being produced posthumously, Arseneau takes issue with the etchings being represented as Goya’s when they were posthumously reworked and altered with aquatint to make them darker by the Royal Academy in Madrid during the making of the “first edition” of the series. Both, he alleges, are forgeries.

Goya died in 1828, he noted, and upon his death, his career as an artist and printmaker was over.

“The dead don’t etch,” said Arseneau. “In other words, without the artists, you don’t have any art.”

He alleged the same in a recent blog post criticizing a similar exhibit at the Pomona College Museum of Art in California, which opened Jan. 17: “Works of visual art such as etchings require a living artist to create them, much less print and approve the subsequent images printed from their etching plates.”

Arseneau, who earned the nickname of “Rodin chaser” from one museum a few years ago, said what he’s seeking is full disclosure from museums.

The Honolulu Museum of Art defended its representation of its Goya exhibit.

Theresa Papanikolas, the museum’s curator of European and American art, said the 1863 version of “Disasters of War” is taken very seriously by art historians as a point of comparison to the handful of lifetime impressions Goya made, and thus is a source of insight into the artist’s practice as a printmaker.

“This print series is an important part of museum collections around the world — from the Prado to the Metropolitan Museum of Art — and we are very fortunate to be able to share it with the Hawaii community,” said Papanikolas in a statement. “We state in all exhibition materials that the first edition of Disasters of War was printed posthumously in 1863, as we do every time we show this masterpiece.”